Philip Davis recently authored a post, The Federal Research Public Access Act (FRPAA), Science, and the Public Good, The Scholarly Kitchen, April 22, 2010. So far, there have been 11 responses to this post.
Comments: This sentence in the post caught my eye: “While much is known about how researchers make use of the scientific literature, much less is known about the consumption of scientific literature by the general public“.
The 11th response (by Philip Davis) includes a similar sentence: “There has been much written on how scholars use the scientific literature; much less about how the lay public uses the literature“. I agree.
After reading the post and the responses, I then attempted to post a response of my own, but failed (perhaps because the blog software didn’t like the HTML tags that I had included in my response?). My response was:
Those unfamiliar with Participatory Medicine may find the website of the Journal of Participatory Medicine | Society for Participatory Medicine to be informative. Some of the initial contributors to this new OA journal [JoPM] are well-informed citizens, not scientists or physicians. See, for example, the contributions by Musa Mayer [bio] , a breast cancer survivor who is a “research advocate”, and by Gilles Frydman [bio], whose wife’s diagnosis of early-stage breast cancer in 1995 led him to become the activist who founded ACOR (the Association of Online Cancer Resources). ACOR has been very successful.
Be openly accessible or be obscure 